Last weekend I hosted a 48-hour Full Indie game jam at the Centre for Digital Media in Vancouver. 30 jammers and some volunteers turned up and about 14 games were made made by a mixture of teams and solo devs. We then had a showcase at the end of the 48 hours. It was an epic weekend and we all had great fun!

Metal Spawn

My game was called Metal Spawn and I teamed up with Designer/Artist Cody Church, who did a fantastic job, and musician Brian Werst, who was so awesome that he made music for multiple games.

I spent most of Friday making sure that everyone was settled in OK and then I talked the evening away, so I didn’t get much work done on the game. But by Saturday I was up to speed and trying to complete all the features we had planned at the beginning (we wanted it to be a cross between Space Invaders and Tower Defense). The final version is of course missing some of those features because 48-hours is never enough time. Still, it’s a fully playable game that embraces the game jam theme of Spawning (this was inspired by the fact it was Father’s Day weekend in Canada).

I also spent a while fiddling with various special effects and making sure that everything in the game had appropriate user feedback, which of course takes time away from adding features. Since the jam I made the aliens animate because it seemed a shame not to use the artwork that had been supplied to me, and made a few other minor tweaks.

Oh and by the way, I didn’t stay awake or on site for the whole 48-hour jam, I went home to get about 5 hours sleep each night, but some people DID stay the whole weekend and napped on sofas. Hardcore.

Download for PC and Mac

The aim of the game is to destroy a set number of aliens in the time limit by using Z to shoot and arrow keys to move. Sometimes aliens drop junk which you can pick up and then use to spawn turrets with X. As you progress through the levels, more aliens spawn and they shoot faster and more accurately. Eventually you’ll no doubt get overwhelmed, but how far can you get?

Download for PC (9.32Mb)

Download for Mac (Intel only) (9.56Mb)

Enjoy! Let me know what you think of it in the comments.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011 at 12:22 am and is filed under Minigames. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.